Customer Profile: Ixia is a globally traded public company operating in around 30 countries.Ixia provides test systems and service verification platforms for wireless and wired infrastructures and services. Ixia’s test solutions are used to verify that converged IP networks operate reliably under load and are secure from threats.

SADA Systems worked with the Director of Enterprise IT at Ixia Communications, who internally led Ixia’s migration to Microsoft Office 365. His responsibilities include designing and maintaining a scalable global architecture spanning multiple networks for clientele across the world. Prior to moving to Office 365, Ixia was running Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 in their own datacenters. Ixia experienced a crisis when one of their data centers had a power outage caused by a nearby fire. All productivity came to a standstill when the company could not access their servers for 48 hours. The incident was the catalyst that pushed Ixia to consider the cloud internally and strive for new initiatives that would encourage IT strategies that would benefit the workflows of employees and increase, rather than hinder, productivity.

Ixia staffs approximately 2,000 employees located in over 41 offices located across the world – as Ixia expanded, employees utilized their own devices in an environment that encouraged the use of favored communication tools. The diverse combinations of communications software and hardware meant a huge amount of administrative overhead for Ixia’s IT staff, who had to manage systems and solutions that each required varied levels of expertise.

Ixia decided to eliminate their entire data center initiative and no longer invest resources with the management of their IT infrastructure on-premise. Ixia decided to eliminate their entire data center initiative and no longer invest resources with the management of their IT infrastructure on-premise. Ixia chose SADA Systems assist in their to move to Office 365, to aid in managing the entire migration process, from the deployment to the adoption.

Solution:

SADA Systems acted as Ixia’s implementation partner for the Office 365 migration while Office 365 was still in its infancy. Acting upon Ixia’s eagerness to vet out the platform and experience the IT benefits of moving to the cloud, the SADA team worked closely with Ixia’s IT team in order to establish integration with their Active Directory (AD) and to migrate the majority of the 1,500 users to Office 365.

The Ixia IT team moved to Office 365 to take advantage of the following benefits:

Global collaboration By unifying the various platforms Ixia employees utilized at their offices with Office 365, Ixia staff could still manage to use the devices of their choice through one platform, over the same set of solutions, which greatly increased the agility of their workflows.

Reduced cost, increased business productivityWith a singular, centralized AD service, IT services can quickly and seamlessly be provided to all employees in all offices.

Simplified platform managementThe SADA team was able to assist Ixia by building out a model to quickly onboard new organizations to the Office 365 platform during a series of Mergers and Acquisitions. SADA was able to quickly get the new organizations up and running with the Office 365 platform on day one, mitigating any downtime and allowing users to fully take advantage of Office 365 right away.

Results and Benefits:

Since the initial migration of 1,500 users, Ixia has moved another 500+ users to Office 365 with SADA’s assistance, for a total of 2,000+ users. Currently, Ixia is looking into SADA’s Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) in Azure and ongoing cloud-based managed support services, and continuing to leverage SADA’s M&A deployment model by mirroring it for future acquisitions.

Is Office 365 Just Office in the Cloud?

Short answer: No—it's so much more! Learn how Office 365 adds security, mobility and speed to processes. This eBook will explain how combining familiar tools with powerful additions like Power BI, OneNote, and OneDrive can help your business manage and tackle more tasks.